Live - Portland Orgy In NYC: The Out Crowd And Dandy Warhols

Last night was a regular Portland, OR orgy at Webster Hall. The Out Crowd, Matt Hollywood’s current band, and the Dandy Warhols staged a spaced out take over of the typically stuffy Webster. If a survey was taken of the crowd last night, I’m sure the overwhelming majority would have seen Dig! If the audience was there for a film reunion, they got their wish. The Out Crowd took the stage to a surprisingly full room and slammed through tracks off Then I Saw the Holy City and Go On, Give a Damn.

The Out Crowd’s tracks clearly belong to the Brian Jonestown Massacre/Dandy Warhols family, but in the end it matters less who came up with the sound first and more how well the band you’re watching delivers it. And the Out Crowd is great. Matt writes great pop songs, and he’s surrounded himself with a stage-full of like-minded musicians. The combo of Caleb Spiegel’s bass, Elliott Barnes’ propulsive rhythm guitar lines and Stuart Valentine’s lazy but locked in drumming keep the songs chugging forward, providing a Stones Velvets base over which Matt tosses out his psych guitar lines. Rounding out the group, Sarah Jane hops from tambourine to guitar to keyboards, filling in the Out Crowd sound and pitching in all the right areas for songs that vary from psych pop to drone rock to the bluesy looseness that the band pulls off so well. Dig! fans hopes were answered when Matt brought out BJM’s Anton Newcome to play guitar on a track mid set. Good for fans of the music, bad for those members of the crowd who were hoping for a scene, Anton came out on stage, played his part and left. This band clearly has its roots in the BJM sound, but Matt and Co. are creating stand-alone songs of their own.

You know when you hit up a Dandy Warhols show you are going to get a ‘show.’ Bringing along their projector - bathing the band in the soft, colorful light of naked women, old stock performance footage and random film clips – and a trumpet player, the Dandy’s deliver a set for fans, pulling tracks off their four official releases. I love the Dandy Warhols as much for their spaced out tracks, when guitarist Peter Holmstrom remains head-down in the shadows, only emerging to kick another pedal on his impressive floorboard, as I do for crowd sing-alongs and the band delivered plenty of both.

Zia McCabe and Courtney Taylor-Taylor were back in the fighting form, keeping the audience with them for the full two hour set. Brent DeBoer is consistently the solid bass to the band, shirt off, hair, uhhh fat, harmonies perfectly locked in. To fill the huge space of Webster Hall, the Dandy’s have brought a trumpet player out on tour with them, which added a quality and layer to the songs that brought last night from a rock show to an event. On the psyched out, slowed down version of “The New Country,” the Dandy’s transformed one of the most country catchy propulsive tracks on Odditorium into a gorgeous shoe-gazer ballad, with Zia wailing away on a harmonica, Courtney sliding his voice into the bow-produced long lines of Peter’s guitar and the trumpet players soaring lines. When the band delivered the one-two punch of “Boys Better” into “Bohemian Like You,” the crowd erupted and I began to think the show was winding down, but we still had “We Used to Be Friends,” “Smoke It,” and a seasonally inspired version of “Little Drummer Boy,” before the band left the stage and a satisfied crowd, with Matt Hollywood standing amid his fans at the front of the stage.